If this is too far OT, ignore it, but blaming the “current situation” on America’s past does seem to be part of our obsession (and over-identification) with race.
If it’s true that the “current situation” of blacks in America is primarily a function of our past, what’s the explanation for the fact that everywhere in the world, the approximate rank-order of heterogeneous populations (“rank-order” based on educational achievement; standardized testing; economic success…) of various “races” is always the same? (And feel free to correct me if my impression is wrong about this.)
I’m also curious to know if there is any country in the world that has a reasonably heterogeneous mix of races, and whose population of blacks has a success rate (same sort of criteria, but feel free to add your own) that exceeds that of American blacks vis a vis the other races represented in that country?
If the answer to my first question is that “It is the same everywhere” and if the answer to the second is that “Blacks are always on the bottom” then I suggest America’s past cannot be a sufficient explanation for “the current situation”–indeed, it is no longer an explanation of any kind given the efforts over the last 50 years to atone and rectify past discrimination.
I am open–indeed, eager–to be educated on this. In the absence of evidence otherwise, though, I suggest that the notion that our “current situation” (by which I assume you mean the relative underperformance of blacks in the US) is primarily a result of past sins is a popular one without any substantive underpinning.
Unfortunately it is not that simple. It’s my understanding that the great majority of non-indigenous black populations in the world are the result of the slave trade. Immigration from post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa has been, for the most part, limited relative to that prior huge demographic shift. Further colonialialization did its own number on sub-Saharan Africa such that teasing out its sometimes pernicious influence from current conditions is rather difficult.
So even if you had an answer to your question ( and I can’t think of anywhere that descendants of slaves are thriving as a non-underclass myself ), my contention would be that it wouldn’t be enough information in of itself to prove anything.
African immigrants to the States are doing better than either black or white Americans. Granted, these are mostly upper class Africans and their children, but if blacks are inherently, genetically inferior, it shouldn’t matter, right?
The only way to get to the bottom of this issue is to run a trial on a comparable white population. Any volunteers?
So you missed out on all the marches? These have been the biggest demonstrations to occur in So Cal in the past decade. These marches were specifically concerned with demands for amnesty for lawbreakers and demands for changes in US law. I guess you neither read newspapers, or follow broadcast news.
Here in So Cal, Spanish is mandatory for a number of public and private sector jobs. Government agencies and schools also make considerable efforts to provide information and materials in a host of different languages - Sapnish, Korean, Armenian, Russian, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Tagalog.
Since wealth correlates with IQ, yes indeed; it would matter. You’d be selecting out for a subpopulation with an average higher IQ, just as you would if you selected out children of wealthy whites versus poor whites.
I’m not sure what you mean by “doing better”…are you talking about performance on standardized achievements that quantitate educational attainment, or participation in outreach affirmative action programs that help correct past discrimination?
Thanks for the cite; I’ll take a little more time to look through the numbers. (I’m trying to figure out how African-born blacks are only 16% of the black immigrant population…are the rest Caribbean?)
In any case, if the educational achievement of black strangers from wretchedly dysfunctional African countries is remarkably superior, it would seem to me to lend credence to the notion that the underperformance of black US native citizens is not attributable to some sort of historic slight or current discrimination against blacks, for instance.
So, for instance, your expectation would be that post WWII black immigrants in Sweden (very few Swedish blacks were a result of the slave trade…) would be performing on par with the rest of the population? Or at least other non-black immigrants? And the success of Indians in Uganda over native blacks due entirely to the British colonialists? And the fate of the businesses they left behind when Idi Amin expelled them also due to colonialization?
And as far as “colonialization” goes, how long should that be rendered as a reasonable explanation for the state of African nations? In general, has the progress in, say, Zimbabwe, been on an upward path for the past 28 years? Or is the “pernicious influence” such that three decades and a lot of external effort later, colonialism is still the culprit for what appears to be a completely incompetently run country?
Is the short answer to the underperformance of modern black populations, whether majority or minority; historically black or imported by force; immigrant by invitation or emigrant by circumstance…–is the short answer that they were enslaved and discriminated against?
There is a difference between providing no evidence, and having evidence disputed. For whatever reason, you say that the signs are all modern creations, and the eyewitness accounts are wrong. At that point I just shrug my shoulders and give up since there is no way to prove if the signs are the real deal or whether people long dead saw what they think they did.
There is also a difference between believing history and dwelling on it. Ignore the Irish, lets look at being female in this country. In the past we had essentially zero rights and even when I was born women were still trapped in the husband-house-kids role, unless they chose to remain unmarried which few did due to the heavy pressure from society. Even now we still have men who try to control “their” women by beating on them, rape and essentially imprisonment in their homes. Which is illegal but not really enforced unless it gets very bad. It was only around 30 years ago that spousal rape began to be illegal, and in some states more like 15 years ago. Women still face glass ceilings, denial of employment and maybe still denial of advanced education - I don’t know on that one since I don’t know any women of that age. Should women be dwelling on these things and not continuing to move forward? Should they be helpless/hopeless due to past injustice? Should they hate all men now because men were awful to women in past generations?
Which is a truly ideal way to start a discussion. :rolleyes:
I have never said anything even close to that. If you weren’t so bent on dismissing me, you might actually understand what I am trying to tell you.
The bolded part is an excellent example of how you are misreading my posts. I know that the blacks had it worse than any other people here, what I was asking in that bolded part was “are you excusing the current behavior simply because their past experience was worse?” You say it makes a difference - of course it does, but the blacks are the only group who carry their past experience into the present, even those who have not experienced anything worse than the average US citizen. It isn’t like the blacks are the only ones currently being discriminated against, and apparently on average their income status is better than the Mexicans here. For some reason, we are expected to know, sympathize with and use as an excuse things that happened before most of us were born - for the blacks only.
So, how long exactly will it be OK for the blacks to continue to use their past history as an excuse and a club? How long did all the others do it - the Irish, the Chinese, the Japanese, etc? Did any of those march and riot to get equal footing?
Did your parents indentify themselves as German-American or Irish-American on official forms, the census and essentially daily? Or was it just when there was a time to have some German or Irish celebration like Oktoberfest?
Are you? There is a long history of blacks who march and riot and claim this and that due to the history of slavery and lack of civil rights, and it is only slowly getting better. There is very little history of this sort of thing coming from the Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans etc, and none of them are having a serious problem fitting in with the rest of our society. Your conclusion from history is that the reason the blacks are still experiencing problems is because their ancestors were slaves - my conclusion is that their attitude is a major factor.
The part I actually quoted came directly from the OP. The part about black leaders came later on and I didn’t quote that.
No, didn’t miss out on any of that. Quite a few non-Mexicans running that and I’d be surprised if any illegals were in on it - would be kind of stupid, no? The thing is, it didn’t appear to be the Mexicans themselves driving this but even if it was, we are talking a minor blip compared to all of the marches, etc done by and for blacks.
I am totally aware of it, I’m not sure why you think I’m not. I’m not aware of any jobs where being able to speak Spanish is mandatory but then I am not in the job market. Yes, materials are translated into a bunch of different languages and I’m not sure how I feel about it, but that is the government making that decision.
I have already pointed out the evidence that you repeatedly choose to ignore. Historians searching the morgue editions of newspapers, (and, recently, doing searches on copies stored electronically), have routinely failed to find any advertisements for jobs that indicated Irish need not apply. OTOH, those same papers do indicate that many jobs were for “whites only.” The fact that we have evidence for one type of discrimination and a lack of evidence for the other type of discrimination in the same papers is, itself, evidence of a particlular situation–or the lack of one.
At this point, I doubt that you can see the distinction, so I guess we’re just going in circles.
I know women who do dwell on those situations. Very few black people I know “dwell on” their history (although I realize that some do). It may be a bad thing to dwell on old history, but it appears to be only your personal and uncorroborated impression that views most and only black people as being hung up on the past.
Start a discussion? We are days and pages into this discussion in which you demonstrate a tenuous grasp of history and a number of logical lapses. I was merely responding to your accusation that I had resorted to name-calling, noting that I have only mentioned this deficit in your style of argumentation and not actually made any personal remarks against you.
But you have said exactly that. You have made a big deal about the way the Irish have overcome discrimination, contrasting that to how you think blacks have not. I know what you are trying to tell me. You just happen to be wrong.
You have exactly inverted the discussion at this point. I merely note that the black experience, (which includes a lot of current history even though you keep claiming it is in the past), has had an effect on specific aspects of certain portions of the black population. People who watched their educated neighbors forced to take menial jobs came to believe that education was a waste of time and that attitude has had an unfortunate affect on some portions of the black community. People who watched their neighbors who became financially succesful belittled and even robbed and sometimes murdered with the approval of white society came to distrust financial success as a lightning rod for abuse so that some portions of that community have failed to invest in better wealth. People today continue to be denied access to decent housing or employment (although at a lower rate than in previous years). These are points to which I have alluded earlier that you have resolutely ignored while going on about “past” history.
I do not think that it is legitimate to use black history as some sort of club today. I do think it is legitimate, when a group is accused of “failing” at something for them to point out existing obstacles–especially when other people try to pretend that all the obstacles have been removed. If the obstacles are rooted in history, that will be part of the discussion. I will also note that the Irish were notorious for rioting, (New York multiple times between 1830 and 1850, in 1863, and in 1871, Boston in 1863, in the 1830s at railroad construction sites in Maryland and at least one canal construction site in New York, in the 1850s at a railroad construction site in (West) Virginia, etc.), and that a number of other ethnic groups have also engaged in that behavior as they escaped ghettoes and poverty.
Actually, between 1865 and 1965, pretty much all the rioting was initiated by whites suppressing blacks, so your “long history” may not say what you think it does. Most of the black rioting has been concerned with current situations, not slavery, and, as I have noted, most of the other ethnic groups (particularly the Irish), have engaged in riots on a number of occasions.
The “fitting in” situation, of course, is a bit different as blacks cannot simply “fit in” the way that other immigrants from Europe can. That is why we can still find examples of discrimination in housing and employment even today: it is simply easier to mark blacks as “other” than it is to hold other groups separate. (There is a bit of difference with the Asian immigrant experience, but we could address those situations after we get the facts established for European immigrants. )
Really? I was responding to this statement:
The “very first post in this thread” (i.e., the OP), says nothing about black leaders at all.
No, you have repeatedly chose to ignore my responses to what you have presented, which is a lack of evidence. Your conclusion from the lack of surviving physical evidence is that it never happened, my conclusion is that it just didn’t survive. Or maybe it never existed, something we will never now know. But I do know from having researched the roots of various dog breeds that printed evidence disappears due to its lack of durability. That added to no need to keep the signs may be why there are no NINA signs still around. Or it could be that those ones that you call of a modern font are real.
Uh, and what is your personal and uncorroborated impression of women who dwell on the past poor treatment of their sex? Do you think that you living in a different area might be why you know “very few” black people who appear to dwell on their history?
You really don’t read what I post here do you? Or take any care to monitor what you say?
Well that’s helpful. I am wrong that the Irish, Chinese, Japanese, etc have made a place for themselves here despite bigotry? I’m wrong that the blacks are still having serious trouble? I am wrong that you are harping on the vagueness of the Irish history here and ignoring almost all of the other examples I’ve used?
You are saying that these things are happening to blacks now? Routinely? That educated blacks are being forced to take menial jobs, at a time when whites/asians/whatevers are not? Financially successful blacks are belittled? Robbed and murdered with approval? How are they being successfully denied access to decent housing or employment, other than on the same basis that any non-black is denied? And the biggie - are blacks denied, robbed, murdered, belittled at a rate any higher than any other minority?
Its just way too easy to say that black person X was denied a job because he was black and not because he was (pick any or all) unqualified, lacked necessary education, lacked experience, acted like a prick at the interview, they had already decided to hire within but had to post it anyway. We don’t see complaints like this from any other minority group, at least not at the same rate.
Well, those obstacles just don’t exist any more do they? No black will lack for an education thru 12th grade (whatever that is worth these days), they can work hard and get a scholarship or work hard and save money for a secondary education. Or they can just work their way up like I did. Or they can claim bigotry and just not try.
Well, that’s convenient for you isn’t it? The Irish and other “lesser” UK people were the only large immigration here, yet they were discriminated against by the WASPs. Then the blacks, then the various Asians, but we should ignore the Asians? What about the Mexicans?
Again, you didn’t read what I wrote, so there really isn’t much I can say without repeating myself - again.
It took Irish Catholics a long time to assimilate into mainstream American society. They were associated with violent crime and general squalor for several generations. There are still pockets of hard core Irish poverty in cities like Boston and other parts of the Northeast.
Irish Catholics in America were and are still to some extent known for nursing long term historical grievances. That’s why the IRA received significant amounts of funding from sympathizers in the US.
Black Americans were defined as a separate category of person under the law in many states. The last of these laws was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1967 in Loving v Virginia, but we’re still talking about three straight centuries where people of African ancestry were considered unfit for marriage to anyone other than other people of African ancestry. No other ethnic group faced restrictions to this extent. In fact, Chinese Americans in Mississippi, and Mexican Americans in Texas went to court to prevent the State governments from classifying them as “colored,” that is black, and therefore ineligible to marry or go to school with whites.
This isn’t just a matter of law. The laws were merely a reflection of deeply held social values. White Americans generally excluded black Americans from social, educational, and religious institutions, as well as any jobs above the menial level. We’re not talking ancient history. We’re talking things that went on well within the lifespan of most Baby Boomers.
Why haven’t “they joined the rest of us”? Because they were banned from joining mainstream America til quite recently, and still aren’t welcome in many places.
Now curlcoat, you’ve also repeatedly confused lawful, organized protest marches with riots. This kind of reasoning would get you an “F” in any good middle school history class. Public expression of dissent is part of our democratic tradition under the First Amendment. We’ve had protest marches throughout our history, and even in the sixties, some of the biggest marches were anti war protests, not civil rights marches.
Well, this is nothing but going around in circles, but for the readers at home i will explain it one more time:
We have newspaper ads and news stories for the last two hundred years or so. In those papers, beginning in the midlle of the nineteenth century, we can find want ads in which it is clearly set forth that only whites need apply. In those same papers, we have found exactly two notices that irish need not apply. It is not a lack of physical evidence; we have the papers. In order for your “lack of evidence” to be meaningful, we would have to speculate that all but two of the ads excluding Irish over 150 years disappeared from the papers of multiple large cities without leaving any suspicious trace of their removal from the papers while (apparently) all of the ads in exactly the same papers rejecting non-white applicants were not harmed by the same mysterious phenomenon that removed the NINA ads.
As an analogy, we can determine where cars and trucks began replacing buggies and wagons because we can see a period in which wagons and buggies were advertised, then a period when cars and trucks began to be advertised, and finally a period when no buggies or wagons were advertised except as antiques. Would you suggest that the absence of ads for buggies and wagons in the 1950s and 1960s was simply a lack of evidence and that there were still just as many buggies and wagons exchanging hands?
You would be on firmer ground regarding window signs because they could have all faded and been turned into kindling without any record that they had existed. From that perspective, you could challenge my assertion on the grounds that a lack of evidence is not evidence of absence. However, that argument is worthless regarding the newspapers because the situation is different. (That is why I point to a different bit of evidence regarding the window signs. I do not claim that it is conclusive, but it is supportive. If one searches the Internet for images of signs proclaiming “No Irish Need Apply,” one finds (in the first few dozen pages) exactly three signs. Oh, there are numerous search hits, but those hits all point to the same three signs. Two of the signs are in exactly the same font–a font that was simply not used prior to the late 20th century. The third sign is in a site where it is noted that much of the decoration is “recreated.” Further, not one of the signs has an actual history associated with it. Nothing saying, “Found in the basement of Smith’s General Store.” or “Saved in McGillicuddy’s attic after Siobhan stole it from the Johnson factory.” (There is one example that notes that the sign might have been created as a prop for the movie The Molly Maguires–a movie not noted for its historical accuracy representing the events surrounding the destruction of that group.))
Now, I acknowledge that I posted that there was “no” newspaper evidence for NINA, however that was with the understanding that I had already pointed out in an earlier post that it did actually appear in two whole ads (in the last 160 years or so).
When put that way, as you have done throughout this thread: Yup.
The bigotry that other groups have faced has been different in duration, in severity, in kind, and in how recent it has been to what blacks have suffered, so some portion of the black population is going to have have been less successful in overcoming it.
Beyond that, of course, is the fact that most blacks are overcomiing those problems, yet you post as though nearly all blacks are still impaired in some way.
While going on at length claming I have not read your comments, you then post this sort of thing that indicates that you have certainly not read mine.
I really doubt that qualified blacks are being routinely forced to take menial jobs, now.
I am not aware of any successful blacks being humiliated or robbed, with the approval of white society, today.
What I noted, however, was that history produces results. There is a segment of the population that lost the goals of education and success because they saw both traits failing to help their fellow people.
There is a culture of despair in many inner city neighborhoods that had its roots in the very recent past when such hostile actions were common.
I do not think that this excuses poor behavior and I do not believe that anyone is owed handouts on that basis. (Neither do most black people.) However, ignoring those situations and pretending that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made the playing field level for everyone is nothing more than an excuse to use one’s own ignorance to rationalize condemning other people.
Partly, this is because some small segment of the black population would prefer to game the system by lodging such complaints. Partly, this is because it remains true to a certain extent.
If you are simply going to ignore history and its actual effects on people, we are simply going to go round and round forever.
We’re wasting electrons.
I understand this was not directed at me, and I’d like to take a moment to thank you for your thoughtful post and the time you’ve consumed making them.
I wonder if you’d give a short answer to my question earlier, though: I appreciate how easy it is to produce evidence that the current unequal state of blacks in America must be related to history and its effects.
Is that (the historical mistreatment of blacks in the US), then, also the explanation for the fact that all over the world, the approximate rank-order of blacks as a self-defined population is the same vis-a-vis other populations? That is, it doesn’t seem to me that blacks do poorly only in the US (a fact that can be accounted for by their history, apparently), but equally well to other populations everywhere else.
And second, do blacks in the US currently do better, or worse, than blacks everywhere else? I know it’s hard to find some sort of measure, but if we look at income, education, standardized performance tests–whatever…
In other words, it’s not my impression that blacks in the US do worse in either absolute or relative terms compared with blacks everywhere else in the world. That single perception of mine (and I am willing to be corrected of it if I am wrong) is, for me, the most signficant thing contradicting the view that black performance here in the US today is the result of US history.
I have no idea what the answer to your second question might be and am not sure I could figure out an answer to it. (I don’t belive that standardized tests work all that well in our society and I have absolutely no faith in their ability to create accurate cross-cultural comparisons.)
As to your first point, it would seem to me that the history of blacks “all over the owrld” has been pretty similar, beyond which, I do not know what a “rank-order” is.
If someone wished to make an issue of test scores among blacks in Sweden, I would want to know how many of those people are first or second generation. This is an important question, given that the overwhelming majority of Swedish blacks are recent immigrants from Somalia and Eritrea who had a multi-generational disruption of the educational process in the midst of civil war and who landed in industrial cities in Sweden just as an economic downturn placed them into an unemployed category. In addition, we might want to compare the scores of blacks to the scores of Arabs, Iranians, Bulgarians, and Serbs who are recent immigrants. (I have noticed that several stories headlining the problems of “black” Swedes wind up discussing all the other immigrant groups in the details of the stories, as though Arabs, Iranians, and refugees from Southeast Europe could all be treateds as “black” for the purposes of the articles.
Beyond that, blacks in all the European countries such as Britain and France, as well as Sweden, tend to be recent immigrants or second generation. Are the troubles associated with them really any different than the troubles that many immigrant groups have suffered in their first couple of generations in the U.S.? Polish and Italian immigration to the U.S. was curtailed before 1920, yet there continued to be an accepted belief in the innate stupidity of Poles and the innate criminality of Italians well into the 1960s and even later. Asians are, (in the mythology of people like J. P. Rushton), smarter than Europeans, on average, yet I continually encounter stories of the serious problems in the U.S. Hmong communities–a situation that I would tend to attribute to the fact that they are recent immigrants who have had to emigrate twice, (first to Thailand, then to the U.S.), in the last generation.
As to black problems “all over the world,” I would note that there really are relatively few places where they actually live in the world and most of those places have parallel histories: they are in Africa, where their entire cultures were seriously disrupted for over 100 years, (sometimes for as long as 400 years), they are scattered around the Caribbean in island nations where colonial policies kept them under employed and under educated until recently, when those nations were “set free” with no industries or resources to create wealth, or they are in places such as the U.S. or Brazil where they were, by culture or by law relegated to the status of second class citizens. It is not as though there was a country in Africa that escaped the long hand of European or Arab domination and then failed on their own. There is no location in the Americas where blacks freely immigrated and established their own nation in a resource rich region and still failed.
Given that the black situation in the U.S. is improving about one generation after the majority of negative pressures were finally removed, I would say that environmental situations will explain most apparent deficits.
Didn’t get around to reading the thread before posting?
It is not true that “black people” continue to identify with the slavery in their past. There are some who do, but it is hardly a universal trait. Of the limited number who do, they are liable to have a wide variety of reasons to prompt them to do so.
Broad brush claims do not help the discussion.
Mistaken beliefs about what happened 2,000 years ago do not make good comparisons to events that happened in the last 150 years.
No one has claimed that only one group has ever endured slavery. That claim is what is known as a straw man.
The mistake was in claiming that today’s Italians are the actual descendants of the Romans whom you (erroneously) claim enslaved the Germanic tribes. Most of the land that Rome conquered in what is now Germany was held, at that time, by the Celts, not the Germanic tribes. Rome did establish a series of strongpoints between the Rhine and the Elbe as a, (rather unsuccessful), buffer zone against Germanic intrusion into the empire, but they never really enslaved the Germanic peoples. On the other hand, as Rome lost power, the Germanic tribes did sweep into Italy so that a lot of current Italians are descended from Germanic peoples.
As to a cut-off date for righting wrongs, I have no specific period in mind, but as you would realize, had you actually read the thread, slavery is only one part of the situation, with oppressive laws and social customs extending well into the latter half of the 20th century playing a large role in the current problems.
“…The mistake was in claiming that today’s Italians are the actual descendants of the Romans whom you (erroneously) claim enslaved the Germanic tribes…”
Very astute! Exactly what I was trying to convey!
A goodly number, if not the majority, of today’s Americans are descendants of immigrants that arrived AFTER the abolition of slavery! Why should they feel any guilt, or responsibility?
I just wish that ~12% of the population, would stop committing ~50-60% of violent crimes.
